In the Homestretch, Obama Comes On Strong

President Obama spoke to the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Sept. 24.CreditDamon Winter/The New York Times

“The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” says the ancient proverb. But don’t tell that to President Obama, who is furiously bombing Bashar al-Assad’s enemies in Syria while insisting that Mr. Assad’s regime is also the enemy. Best also not to remind Mr. Obama about leading from behind, or of his arguments against being drawn into the Syrian civil war or getting embroiled in any Middle Eastern conflicts.

This was the week the president went before the United Nations General Assembly and proclaimed, in effect, that the United States was back out front again — not only against the brutality of Islamic terrorists, which “forces us to look into the heart of darkness,” but also against Russia’s vision that “might makes right,” against the spread of Ebola, against global warming.

“Too often, we have failed to enforce international norms when it’s inconvenient to do so,” Mr. Obama told the General Assembly, a phrase that seemed almost apologetic in the context. “And we have not confronted forcefully enough the intolerance, sectarianism and hopelessness that feeds violent extremism in too many parts of the globe.”

Mr. Obama’s words and actions heartened those who had equated his reticence in foreign affairs with a decline in American global leadership.

But his assertive stance also roused fears that America was being drawn into another open-ended war without a coherent plan, and without the public scrutiny that a proper congressional debate would have provided.

After Holder, What?

The Obama administration’s domestic record also came under sharp scrutiny in the past week with the announcement that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. was leaving. In many ways. Mr. Holder, the first African-American in his office just as Mr. Obama was the first in his, shared much of the ambivalence with which the administration is viewed nearly three-quarters of the way through its two terms.

He battled fervently to correct what he perceived as major civil-rights wrongs on same-sex marriage, voting rights and racial discrimination in the justice system. Yet he also earned the scorn of civil liberties advocates when his Justice Department approved the targeted killing of civilians, including Americans, without judicial review, and aggressively tried to stop leaks of government information.

The timing of Mr. Holder’s resignation was certain to provoke a vicious struggle between Republican and Democratic legislators over his successor. The homestretch is shaping up to be a brutal one for Mr. Obama.

Separatism

In a striking counterpoint to the calm Scottish referendum on independence the week earlier, China on Tuesday sentenced a Uighur academic to life in prison on charges of separatism. Though the prosecutors never demonstrated that Ilham Tohti, an economics professor, advocated independence or violence for China’s Uighurs, the court ruled that his criticism of the government’s treatment of the minority in his classroom, on his online forum and in conversations with foreign journalists “bewitched” his students and “exploited foreign forces to create pressure to make Xinjiang an international matter.”

The extraordinarily harsh sentence, which included the confiscation of Mr. Tohti’s assets, reflected the Chinese Communist establishment’s extreme sensitivity to any dissent, and especially to the Uighur insurgency in the Xinjiang region of western China. On Thursday, Chinese state media reported that a series of bomb blasts and violent clashes on the previous weekend left 50 dead and many injured in the region.

The Uighurs are Turkic-speaking Muslims who identify culturally and ethnically with the Central Asian nations that border Xinjiang. The region came under Chinese rule in the 18th century and was incorporated into Communist China in 1949; since then, vast numbers of Han Chinese have moved in, creating strong frictions with the local population.

Mr. Tohti, 44, was a strong critic of Chinese assimilation policies, but also a voice of moderation. He cited figures to show that investment in the region was going mainly to newly arrived Han, and he criticized restrictions on religious practice, but he never advocated secession or violence.

In an interview shortly before he was detained in January, he suggested that he was being punished less for his championship of the Uighurs than for revealing the failure of government policies. “Sometimes I feel like the government is more afraid of people telling the truth than they are of the protests and violence,” he said.

To Bomb or Not to Bomb

History will have the last word on whether Mr. Obama’s decision to bomb terrorist bases inside Syria was right. But once the Islamic State barbarians threatened to overrun Iraq and began publicly decapitating American and British hostages, the president’s hand was forced.

The question was whether by identifying the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, as the premier “network of death” in the region, Mr. Obama was in effect bolstering some of the competing villains. It was not clear, for example, how American fighters could operate in Syria without at least tacit consent from the Syrian government. One Syrian diplomat boasted in a pro-government newspaper that “the U.S. military leadership is now fighting in the same trenches with the Syrian generals, in a war on terrorism inside Syria.”

This being the Middle East, the complications did not stop there. America’s Arab allies in the campaign against the Islamic State — Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are all monarchies that survived the Arab Spring. Then, Washington had appeared to be moving away from traditional alliances with autocratic Middle Eastern leaders, but now they were again being called essential partners in an existential struggle.

Perhaps to demonstrate that they were not the same old emirs, the United Arab Emirates ambassador to the United States noted that leading the country’s jets in the raids on Monday night was Maj. Mariam Al Mansouri, the country’s first female fighter pilot.

Appearing on the MSNBC program “Morning Joe,” Ambassador Yousef Al Otaiba said that while women did face barriers in the country’s Islamic society, Major Mansouri’s role demonstrated an essential difference between moderate Muslims and the fanatics of the Islamic State.

Perhaps next time, Major Mansouri can drop leaflets on the group saying, “You’ve been bombed by a woman.”

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.

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